Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 09, 2008 @06:09PM
from the still-crazy-after-all-these-years dept.

Adam Williamson writes "Mandriva has today released Mandriva Linux 2009, the new major release of the popular distribution. 2009 is a bold release which brings the new KDE 4 as the default desktop, along with a re-designed installer and Mandriva Control Center and many other new features. Other significant updates include GNOME 2.24, OpenOffice.org 3, Mozilla Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.27. Key features include new graphical in-line upgrade capability, netbook compatibility, class-leading hardware support, and further improved support for working with mobile devices. For more details, see the Release Tour and the Release Notes. Get it at the download page, or go straight to the torrent list."

Basically, One is a hybrid live/install CD which includes proprietary drivers and browser plugins. Free is a traditional installer edition (2xCD or DVD) which is 100% free / open source software, no NVIDIA / ATI drivers or anything (though you can add them from the non-free repository after install, if you're that way inclined).

Er, no. It's because One is only capable of installing the kernel it uses: One's 'installer' is really just a dd command (okay, I'm over-simplifying, but you get the idea) - it doesn't understand the concept of packages, it's just dumping a ton of data from one place (itself) to another (the hard disk).

So, it can only install the kernel it uses, no matter the hardware. Why does it use desktop586? Simple: because it supports the widest possible range of hardware.

I guess they're pulling the same as Ubuntu did with Firefox 3, it's at -rc9 now and on monday Linus said: "If things go well, I might do a final release mid-week, otherwise it's'next weekend' again." so it should only be a few days away.

Actualy it has been released, but never the less it is almost a guarantee that Mandriva is not using a kernel version released that recently, since Mandriva is very good about thoroughly testing things, and they wouldn't have had time to do so.

I had Mandrake installed some time back, and was happy with the package manager they had at the time since it finally dealt with some of the dependency hell issues that Red Hat suffered from. But at some point a software update and server migration went funny (on their end), and the package manager couldn't find the right site to update itself, and since I couldn't be bothered to dig into the internals to fix it (some of us use Linux to do other things:) and a reinstall looked like the easiest course, I opted to jump ship and tried out Ubuntu instead. But I'm curious to see what's happened in the intervening years.

It's been improved... the best way to handle your update repositories is to use the Easy URPMI site at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ [zarb.org] - just click and it will automagically add the sources for you.

I've been running the Beta and RC versions on my laptop and a desktop, it's been working well. Gonna start torrenting the release version shortly.

As far as I know, Yggrasil and MDE (interim linux) were the first "distros". Debian and Slackware followed soon after. For many years Debian was notorious for its "elitist" users (just an opinion!) Maybe it still is. Since about 2000 (i think) it started to fade. Sure, there were/are heaps of people who swear by debian, but I am pretty sure that it was around 2000 that the (stable) releases began to stagnate. Slink was 2000 I think. Then 3 years, for another "stable release". Then another 3(?) and then 2(?)

Debian is not hard to install and it is the easiest operating system to manage.

Oh, it also has quality assurance unlike that popular brown distro and their 6-month release cycle. Lenny is currently much, *much* more stable than Intrepid. The former will be "good enough" to be called "Debian Stable" in 3 or 4 months, the latter will be rushed out of the door in a couple of weeks or so.

"Quality assurance"? Are you serious? What a load of cow pooh. What on Earth is "quality assurance" anyway? For quality assurance I would, at least, expect a Quality Management System. A certified (ISO) one. Debian does not have that. If there is not a quality management system, why should I belive that Debian offers "quality assurance"?

Debian is not hard to install and it is the easiest operating system to manage.

Debian is easy to install software system, and the OS management is not harder than on other Linux distributions. Like updating the OS in Mandriva is easy as like "urpmi linux-2.6.27" or if you want you can always crap your new OS version from kernel.org and compile it yourself.

The system management is lots easier than on Debian because you have Mandriva Control Center and you can easily set most needed system settings from there by just waving your mouse.

But at some point a software update and server migration went funny (on their end), and the package manager couldn't find the right site to update itself

Until they got merged into Mandrake, Conectiva was the best distro, IMHO. They had RPM with Apt, the best of both worlds. After the acquisition, they opted to drop that feature, keeping the vastly inferior Mandrake package management. Sorry, guys, I wento to Ubuntu, and never looked back.

The main thing I miss now is the Conectiva keyboard mapping. There are

The main thing I miss now is the Conectiva keyboard mapping. There are some subtle but significant differences in the way US-style keyboards handle accented characters, and Conectiva had the smartest setup (easiest to use, less keystrokes needed).

Perhaps it's just a matter of configuring SCIM (smart common input method)? I use Ubuntu 8.04, with the default configurations for Portuguese (my native language), Japanese and Chinese (for hanzi and pinyin) and the only complaint I have is the lack of documentation (for pinyin). It is a very natural and productive input method.

In the past couple months I've seen folks using Ubuntu 8 and Mandrake-whatever-was-the-previous version... and Mandra^H^H^H Mandriva just seemed more finished and polished. It gave me new hope that one of these days there will be a linux I can love. Maybe this one is it... downloading now!

Really, I love KDE 4.x. The work they have done is magnificent and a great achievement. I cannot, however, use it (at the moment) day-to-day. At least Mandrake has waited for a while before including it (KDE 4). At the end of the day though how is it helping Linux? Supposing I was a new Linux user (I'm not, been using it since 1994 and Yggdrasil) I would have to assess Linux on it's "interface". Say I am interested: I will grab the latest "linux version" and install it. I will be presented with KDE4. As an average user, would I judge linux, overall, on the interface. Most LIKELY I WOULD. Distro's have to be current, yeah. But if we want to make linux attractive to joe six pack, we have to start deciding WHAT goes into a standard distro. Including unfinished stuff (IMO) is a show stopper.

This comment is not meant to detract from the great work the KDE people have done for 4.x. They are building a GREAT system and I admire their work.

Well, I guess it depends what you think is best longterm. It's said that to make an omelet you must break some eggs, and KDE4/Qt4 broke pretty much all of them. KDE 4.0 was way premature, maybe it was KDElibs 4.0. but not the K Desktop Environment 4.0. KDE 4.1.2 is really at the point that to make it better you must push it to a greater audience. In a few weeks there's Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4 as the default, basicly they're all going in that direction. I think longterm it is what is necessary to push KDE4 pa

I would have to agree for the most part, except for one little rant..not directed at you though-
its about the joe-six-pack..
I think Joe needs to catch the F.. up with the rest of the world. This dumbing down of things needs to stop, ASAP.
rant over
This new release of Mandriva is fantastic BTW. I tried both gnome and KDE (live) on a few machines and it was flawless.
good job guys

i've been waiting for Mandrive 2009 for KDE 4.1 as 4.0 was supposed to be for developers.

mandriva, and mandrake before the merger with conectiva, was the distro of choice for me. mandrake 6.something was the first distro i was able to install, i still have that disk somewhere. for a little while i flirted with ubuntu but kept coming back for one reason or another. actually, i kept returning because i have a dell vostro 1500 laptop, honestly, i'd been better off with an abacus than this garbage, but anywa

thanks for the heads up.
currently running 2008.1 on Toshibas satellite laptop with everything working (yes, 3d too, (compubiz))...
i am very happy w/2008.1, and was looking forward to '09, but with your wireless issues and the ndis wrapper (currently using madwifi) i will remain content, and keep on chuggin.
my only complaint in 08.1 is that when i tried to switch into "enlightenments" w.m. i kept getting a error that another window manager was already running...(even after going into runlevel3
sooo...

I gave a spin to 2009-RC2 and I found it very lacking in many aspects, including general theme, while KDE4 implementation of the mandriva theme was mostly there small details (but important ones) like desktop icons where left out, if you look at the 2009 errata outstanding issues where not handled, like multimedia keyboard support on KDE4, it reasonably works on 2008.1 why should it stop working in 2009?, passing the blame to kmilo is no way to handle it (they would be better of with KDE3 for now).

It's not really 'passing the blame'. KMilo is the bit of KDE which handles multimedia keys. If it doesn't exist for KDE 4 yet then, well, we just can't really handle multimedia keys in KDE 4. There's no way around it.

We can do a partial hack - bind the volume up, down and mute keys to kmix via KDE's own hotkeys support - and I'm trying to get that done as an update.

The question was whether issues on that level should stop us using KDE 4 for this release, bearing in mind the release will be the current one f

The difference between distros is in the details, having a regression is not good for a distro like Mandriva famed for being stylish, very usable and that "Just Works".

I would like to congratulate the Mandriva team as working around these issues is unavoidable and the sooner we get to it the better.

So yeah, I'm downloading it right now and will upgrade (clean install), I'm a bit critic of the latest changes but Mandriva has always been my distro of choice and will stick to it (and will start sending/* spam

In xorg-7.4 keyboards are handed via hal with evdev driver -- the layout is therefore generic and will make it much more easier for distro makers to configure multimedia keyboards -- all of them will send e.g. the same event on Volume Up keypress.

We already have this (and have since 2008.1) - the XF86Audio keysyms. The problem is not at that level. That level is there and working fine in 2009 - pretty much all keyboards with multimedia keys pass the appropriate keysyms. The issue is specific to KDE 4 and it's just that it has nothing to *handle* those keysyms. KDE 3 has an app called KMilo which handles them, but it's not been ported to KDE 4 yet.

If you run KDE 3, GNOME, or Xfce in Mandriva 2009, the multimedia keys will work fine.

Got you wrong then. I still prefer using esekeyd so all my hotkeys work e.g. in fullscreen games. IIRC KMilo works only within KDE so if you start full-screened weshoth you will not be able to adjust sound with your keys.

Besides, can't you just install KMilo3 on top of kde4? I use k3b in kde4 without a problem.

Each distro includes OpenOffice.org, Gnome, KDE, etc. I can get Gnome 2.24 by upgrading packages within my existing distro. openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 9 will ship with it. So what actually sets this apart? I haven't used Mandriva since it was Mandrake, and I'm curious.

I hear they got a great "Control Panel" that rivals Yast. What is it like? What unique features does the distro have?

I half agree and half disagree, it's also to tell "Why should you upgrade to 2009? What new features are you getting?" for existing Mandriva users. For people using another distro the unique features may matter more, but it's a shame if people aren't aware of the progress made because it's common to all distros. And YMMV but it's not my most important criteria when choosing distros, usually it's about being reasonably current while breaking relatively little - not that my distro is that unique compared to o

Some distros do have unique features. For instance Fedora 9 had kernel-mode setting if you had an Intel video card. At the time, it was only one of a few, if not the only installers to offer full disk encryption in the installer, etc. Ubuntu offers Wubi.

I hear they got a great "Control Panel" that rivals Yast. What is it like? What unique features does the distro have?

The Control Center (i.e. "Control Panel") is probably the best feature that Mandriva has. For me, it allows easy setup of just about everything - from NFS and SMB servers and clients to a backup feature that just works (so long as the hard drive has space - which they also deal with). Much of these things can be edited by webmin, but the control center GUI is easier to use than webmin. Anot

I don't think they've ever actually said that, and it's certainly not the case:). There was a random comparison run by that ever dependable figure Some Guy On His Personal Blog which claimed 39% lower memory usage for KDE 4 or something, but it was basically utterly wrong. I did test this for my own curiosity - there's nothing insanely broken about our KDE 4 build, but on a clean 2009 install, the memory usage figures booted to a default desktop with a te

Actually it was correct. Those were test about running Qt4 applications vs Qt3 applications. Not running KDE3 vs KDE4. If you run KDE3 with 10 service/applications running by default and KDE4 with 25 service/applications running by default, there is very good change that KDE4 would need more RAM.

Those test what was done then, were just proof that KDE4 applications does not need so much CPU time and they are more responsive for user etc.

There are issues with QT apps running really slow on boxes that use the proprietary Nvidia driver because that driver can't handle xrender calls very well. Yesterday Nvidia released a new driver that is supposed to fix the xrender issue. People are reporting that KDE 4 apps now fly on their boxes.

Conversely, I've seen people with low-end systems claim that KDE 4 flies on their boxes if they have onboard Intel graphics, because that driver is so good with xrender calls.

So you are saying "Why I should get a Ubuntu or OpenSUSE if Mandriva 2009 has everything what others has and even more too".

This is always a comparising a Linux distributions, not Linux Operating System. Every new release of distributions is just "a snapshot" of the current work what FOSS community has done in sertain projects.

You get Linux OS (kernel) + new versions of libraries (GNU+others), developer tools (GNU+others) and what important, new versions of desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, LXDE, XFCE) and

It does seem kind of odd that there is no 64bit Mandriva "One" version.

Not that *I* think it is any big deal- I have been running 32bit Linux on my 64 bit machines forever. Why? Because, unless you need more than 4GB of RAM, or running the only few types of apps that really make a difference, 32 bit is almost the exact same performance, and it means just one install disc and set of RPM's for all my machines. Plus there is that whole 32/64 bit Flash issue (which I don't even know if it is really "solved"

My major concern is going to be Pulse Audio. When 2008.1 came out, I migrated from 2008.0. I found out there were patches made to SDL that broke compatibility with many Linux games. It took weeks of "digging them out." to solve the problems. Now sound works the way it should. I'm frightened that it will mean more digging up bad patches in SDL to stop annoying crackling effects in games.

Also, not every computer I own has a "nice" Nvidia FX5200. A few of them have older Sis, Matrox, Intel, and my Cooker Box which has one of the 2009.0 release candidates on it has a Voodoo 3. The Voodoo 3 card crashes when DRI is enabled. Not due to a proprietary driver, but due to some older cards development falling by the wayside.

We provide the latest code X.org has for all drivers, and the hardware detection database is maintained. Aside from that there isn't an awful lot we can do to help older neglected drivers - even if we had the time to devote to maintaining ancient X drivers (which we mostly don't), w

I found out there were patches made to SDL that broke compatibility with many Linux games. It took weeks of "digging them out." to solve the problems.

For SDL: Did a packaging of the pristine upstream source have the same problems? Did you identify which specific patches which caused the problem?

Also, the sound stack for Linux seems overly complicated [livejournal.com] at the current time. There is some guidance [0pointer.de] here, but if you need to have a talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference that says, "Application developers, do not write directly to the hardware interface," you have already failed. Of course, there's some controversy [rastageeks.org] about this guide because a bunch of OSS progr

Um, Mandrake/Mandriva has *always* been a commercial company with commercial offerings. But they have also *always* offered free versions of the distro. And this is what Redhat did before they went completely commercial-only, and what SuSE still does.

I stand corrected. You're right, I remember buying a copy of Mandrake 7 (I think) back in about 2000. But at that time, the only difference between the commercial and downloadable version was the inclusion of a printed manual in the commercial version. Subsequent versions were the same, except you might have received membership in the Mandrake Club if you bought it (it was optional if you downloaded - I know that much cuz I never had a reason to join)

There are no longer any paid Club memberships (we abolished that system last year). There's only the Powerpack subscription, which gives you no privileges, it's a simple product which gives you access to the Powerpack edition for 12 months; nothing else.

The only software that is exclusive to the Powerpack edition is software that is not only non-free, but commercial: that is, software we *could not legally include* in any edition that's free to the general public. Software that

Gentoo is a lot of fun. I used it for about four years. But with Gentoo *I* paid for it in time. Time spent compiling, tweaking, debugging, and getting into the racer mindset that I needed to make everything as optimized as humanly possible.
No doubt I learned a lot from it. I don't know what its like now but I couldn't go back to that.

That's what's great about Gentoo. YOU choose either to leave things as they are or tweak them to your hearts content. Besides you would have just been wasting time in a bar or some other useless pastime. Instead you were learning about Linux and how it works.

I recall a time when they *really* pushed you to buy their product (not that there is something wrong with that). And they did not allow the free download until weeks after their paying customers got to it. There may have been some other perks to paying as well. Anyway, the feeling I got was that if you were not giving them money, you were 2nd class and could not get the full benefits of running the distro.

This changed after Ubuntu and Fedora came along and they (Mandrake/Mandriva) saw that people were l

It is true that they do try to make money. As a commercial company, they have to in order to survive. They give preference and perks to club members. Personally, I think the rates are reasonable and the product is superior to Ubuntu (to use your example) in significant ways, so it is worth it. They have experimented with different concepts, settling on one that seems to work the best for themselves and their customers.

I do wish all the perks were open to everyone, but I can see where giving something ot

It's rather because Slashdot didn't put the story on the front page (only as a between-stories bar, which is easy to miss). When they make a Mandriva story a full front page story, it still gets hundreds of comments.

Mandriva has always been a commercial distribution, ever since 1998. It's only got *more* open over time, never less.

Every story has been low on comments, compared to normal for similar topics, since whatever changes slashdot made to the site a few days ago. Frex, I can no longer access "yesterday's news" (so I can't read or comment on these stories at all) and there are other small issues, like pages that fail to completely load the first time. I doubt I'm the only one affected by all this.

Well, I downloaded the CD and am now in the process of installing it. On the CD, it ran very quickly, especially for a live CD. The usual Folder View slowness in KDE4 that I've experienced in every other distro just did not exist in Mandriva. I'm assuming they used a later nVidia driver. A nice touch. I can already tell I'll like it much better than SuSE.